Barton Goldenberg: Imagine your marketing sales started with a full picture of the individual, what they really want and like. A lot of people look at their customer like this. They're a little bit out of focus. If we had a laser focus on our customer, would we be able to sell marketing service better to them?

Why is it that so few companies have mastered that holistic profile? I don't get it. This is Beneteau, another one of our customers. If you're a sailor or a motor boater, you might know them. They sell to distributors on the one side and they sell directly to consumers on the other side. It's a B2B2C, and they have a similar type of thing.

Again, I kept it generic. It's not important, the actual petals, but it's the same concept: 12-18 months to build the profile. Most companies have 80-90% of the profile information somewhere in the company--notebooks, Excel spreadsheets, Post-its, people leaving the company, knowledge bases, whatever, or can definitely get what they need.

I would just humbly submit that if you don't have the profile, you can't run a data analytics against it. If you can't run the data analytics against it, you'll come out with incomplete segments and/or clusters and/or channels of preference. Then if you go to market to sell a service to customer, you're unlikely to nail it.

SMB Group Co-founder & partner Laurie McCabe explains how SMBs can continue to pursue their traditional business goals amid dramatic changes in customer expectations in this clip from CRM experience 2018.

SMB cofounder and partner Laurie McCabe explains how customer service and the customer experiences businesses create have become the defining features of their brands in this clip from CRM experience 2018.

Carolina von Schrader, Senior Manager, Revenue Strategy, the Washington Nationals, explains how using data to construct a 360-degree of your customer, can enable much better targeted marketing in this clip from her panel at CRM evolution 2018.

SAP Customer Experience Vice President Volker Hildebrand explains how companies can deploy machine learning for predictive maintenance and more proactive customer service in this clip from CRM Evolution 2018.

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